Software Architecture Newsletter #8

Welcome to the 8th edition of the Software Architecture Newsletter!

In  this edition – Service Mesh, Software Architecture trends, VS 2022, a personal message and more…

As usual, if you found something interesting that you think should be included here, you’re interested in a sponsorship, or you have something to say about the content of this newsletter – drop me a mail at memi@memilavi.com

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Architecture                                           
Software Architecture Trends Report – Every year InfoQ publishes their Software Architecture Trends Report, which describes the current state of the Software Architecture industry.
The report outlines the trends that are adopted by innovators, early adapters and so on, and tried to predict which trends are going to stick, and which are going to fade into oblivion.
This report is a must read for every (aspiring) Software Architect, as it outlines quite accurately what we should be aware of in our unique profession.
Read the report here.

Monitoring and Observability in Cloud Native ASP.NET Core Apps  – Monitoring and observability are the foundations of every system, especially distributed ones. The ability to know what’s going on with the system, what’s its health status, or whether there are any errors need handling is a crucial aspect of the system that will help it run smoothly and reliably.
However, design and implement these aspects is not a simple task.
In this blog post, Nish Anil explains how to do that with ASP.NET Core apps. While the technical bits are definitely .NET Core-specific, the post gives great overview about logging, tracing and more, which makes it a great reading for anyone who’s interested in this topic.

Why you should care about Service Mesh – If you’ve ever dealt with Microservices, you’ve probably heard about Service Mesh (in fact, even my Microservices course has a dedicated section about it!). But, if you’re looking for a short, concise introduction to this fascinating world – this article is the place to go. Great overview that will help you get going.

Cloud                                           

Azure Expands Availability Zones – Availability zones are one of the greatest features of the public cloud. Basically, what it means is that a region does not have only one physical datacenter, but more (usually three). These datacenters use separate electricity and cooling mechanisms, thus allow the region to offer great SLA without the need to design a complex, expensive, cross-region disaster recovery (DR) strategy.
Until recently, not all of Azure’s regions had availability zones, and some of them have only a single datacenter (Canada East and South India come to mind, among others). This, however, is going to change according to an announcement made by Microsoft recently. The two major takeaway from this announcement is that: 1) By the end of 2021 every country in which Azure operates will have an Availability Zone  (note that the announcement does not state that all the regions within the country will have AZ, just that there will be AZ in the country), and 2), and more important IMHO, every new region will have AZ.
This is a major announcement, and it will definitely help design and build more reliable and robust systems on Azure.
Read the full announcement here.

Cloud Native is about Culture, Not Containers – Anyone who deals with building systems for the cloud knows what cloud native is. Basically, it’s usually a Microservices-based system that can be installed on a cloud as-is, usually using tools such as Kubernetes.
However, Holly Cummins from InfoQ argues that this is not always the case. True, the system’s architecture should definitely be in-line with what the cloud offers, but this is not enough. The organization’s culture must be adapted to embrace such systems, and using advanced architecture patterns with old school governance, for example, will just choke the speed and block the progress of the development.
Read the full article here.

Cloudera joins Google Cloud – Cloudera, one of the most popular databases when coming to big data & machine learning, has joined Google Cloud.
Cloudera has been offering its cloud-based product (Cloudera Data Platform) on AWS and Azure for a while, and now, with the addition of GCP, it gained bragging rights of running almost anywhere (and let’s not forget on-premises, of course).
Read all about it in this ZDNet piece.

Dev & DevOps                                                

Visual Studio 2022 Preview – Visual Studio, one of the most popular IDEs in the world, is getting a new version! The preview of VS2022 has been released, and it comes packed with new features. Among them – new design, improved code completion (take a look at the video – it’s awesome!), improved support for Git and GitHub, and more. Oh, and VS2022 is a 64bit app! Which means you’re no longer limited to 4GB.
Read the full announcement here.

Discussions                                           

Scaling app – Scaling. We always have to handle it, and we always not sure how… A question was asked in our Facebook Group regarding the best way to design scaling. Dinesh Sen asked how to approach this topic, in order to make sure his app can scale gracefully. He got a lot of comments and suggestions.
Want to read them? Want to contribute your own? Do it here.

Personal Message                           

So this is something different, and quite exciting for me…
As you probably noticed, Software & Cloud Architecture is my passion. I love to read about it, write about it, and of course – practice it.
I have dozens of customers in this field, some of them go with me years back, and my boutique company is quite successful.
And today, I’m excited to announce that my company. Polar Technologies, was acquired by one of the largest software companies in Israel, MalamTeam.
Naturally, this is a very happy moment for me, personally, and a major milestone in my career.
In my new role I’m going to lead all the Azure operations in MalamTeam, and make it one of the leading Azure service provider in the country.
Now, what does it mean for you?
Well, basically nothing. 
The newsletter will continue just as it is, I’m going to continue release courses regularly (in fact, the next course’s recording is already well underway…) and nothing is going to change.

Now, to celebrate this acquisition, I’m running a flash sale on the course that really made it happen – the Microsoft Azure: From Zero to Hero – The Complete Guide course. This course (which quickly became my most popular course…) has all what it takes to help you become a real Azure expert. The demand is sky rocketing, and you don’t want to stay behind…
So click here, get the course for a very special price, and become an expert in the most exciting field in the industry.
 

Get the Microsoft Azure: From Zero to Hero – The Complete Guide course for a special price now!

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So, that was the eighth edition of the Software Architecture Newsletter (temp name).
I hope you enjoyed it, and feel free to suggest and comment on it, simply by replying to this mail.
Also, if you created a unique content you think can be included here – drop me a note!
Looking forward for your feedback!

Cheers,

Memi